Hungry Ghost (Tales of the Pack #2) by Allison Moon

The battle is back on. The Morlocs are still killing and the town is not safe – especially not for women. After the battles of the last book, the pack is re-establishing itself around Renee as Alpha and ready to fight again – but how can they fight when they’re outnumbered and outmatched? Even beyond that, how do they exist as a pack – and as people – without Blythe’s oppressive hands demanding they conform?

And Lexie still needs to find her place – both in the pack and with herself. Unshifting, torn between her mother’s heritage and her werewolfness she can’t run with the pack. But as more and more of her mother’s past becomes clear, she finds a rift opening between her and her father. Then there’s Archer, missing and desperately missed and never far from Lexie’s thoughts.

There’s something about the world building here that doesn’t work for me. I just don’t quite get it. There’s a lot about the werewolves I don’t understand or rather don’t fully understand. I don’t get exactly what a Peacespeaker is, don’t understand what the knife is, don’t understand Lexie’s mother or her aunt. I don’t understand how it all affected Lexie’s werewolfness.

And it translates into the plot as well – I’m not entirely sure how much her dad knows or is involved in or even entirely what was achieved at the end of the book. I’m not entirely sure what the enemy actually is or what the many kinds of werewolves actually means or where they all came from.

I get the rough shape of how everything works – the plot, the world et al- but it is only a rough shape and it has gaps and assumptions and things just kind of hanging without me really knowing what is happening, why or what that truly means. I just ended up really uninvested in the story. I only have the vaguest idea of what was going on and I don’t especially care to know more, sadly, because I just haven’t been even slightly pulled in.

I do know how all the characters feel - and it’s certainly a very character driven book. We have a lot of conflict and interaction and resolve between a few characters – the character development is very solid for these few, but it’s also kind of repetitive. I think some of the time could have been better spent on the plot, especially since we had interactions like Lexie and Randy which I’m still not entirely sure what the point was. Or some are there for various lessons or making a point but still don’t add to the overall very weak story (like Duance for example). A lot of the book just feels like character interactions between Lexie and a random other strung together in a row interspaced with her angst. If we were going to focus on character interactions there are still other characters in the pack itself who are sorely in need of work – like Mitch (who can basically be summed up as “transman”).

One thing I like a lot is a lot of the problems Blythe brought in the last book have been addressed and challenged. There’s much less infodumping and Blythe’s whole super-orthodox-feminism-is-like-this-and-you’re-a-bad-feminist-if-you-don’t-obey-me has not only stopped but has been heavily called out as the ridiculous thing it is. It was really refreshing to see all of the pack expanding more into their own lives, pursuing their own tastes and rejecting the strictures that Blythe forced on them as her version of a very narrow view of feminism. Reading this really helps deal with a lot of the problems on feminism in the first book because it helps parse the good messages that were given and the arbitrary restrictions that Blythe imposed; rather than presenting them as one solid chunk.

There’s also a lot of examination of many feminist issues – from a nice skewering of the whole “nice guy” ideal – with Duane told it doesn’t matter what a nice person he is, Lexie just isn’t interested. There’s a lot of talk about safety and the safety many men take for granted while women are constantly expected to be on guard (the point does lack a lot of intersectionality since it completely dismisses that gay/bi men and men of colour rarely feel safe all the time everywhere as presented). There’s a lot of issues that are covered well with a little less of a lecture or, rather, there is a lecture but it fits a bit more organically than previously

The pack are all lesbians, bi/pansexuals or otherwise queer woman except Mitch. While they generally work really well together as very different women yet all coming together in unity and affection, there is a strong implication or outright saying that all of them except Lexie have been raped or sexually assaulted; there’s a really pernicious trope that GBLT people, especially lesbians and bisexual women, are attracted to the same gender because of trauma or other bad experience with the opposite gender that really undermines the sexuality of GBLT people. This is really underlined with Corwin, now recovering from her rape, is becoming interested in men again – and Sharmalee responds that she cannot touch a woman who has been touched by a man because of her own rape. She even presents the fact that Corwin and Sharmalee are together out of shared trauma empathy which seems to completely reduce any actual love, affection and attraction they have for each other to a rejection of men. It’s sad that these wonderfully strong and powerful loving bonds between women had such an unchallenged shadow over them

Lunatic Fringe (Tales of the Pack #1) by Allison Moon

Lexie is going away to college – though laden with self-doubt and insecurities as well as a whole lot of questions as to exactly what she’s doing and what she wants to be.

But college is a place where she can learn – and far more than she realised. She can learn about the world, form some solid friendships, fall in love, truly discover her sexuality and find out who she is

She also finds out a whole lot about werewolves. And werewolf hunters. And loving werewolves and how things are rarely as simple as they appear.

I had real problems getting into this book. It’s very descriptive and overwritten and tends to ramble around in places. I think it’s trying to be evocative to carry the full power or emotion of a moment or the scale of various feelings or new concepts, but instead it kind of rambled. I think part of the problem was that, with the title and the blurb, I knew we were going to be dealing with werewolves. It’s one of the problems with any “big reveal” book. The cover/title/blurb/pre-amble/author’s introduction tells you a book is about werewolves (or vampires or angels or whatever) then you spend half of the book playing coy until the ZOMG WEREWOLVES moment that we all knew was coming. It’s hard to pull off in a way that doesn’t leave the reader bored.

Lexie herself isn’t a bad character per se, she’s very much what she is, a small town young woman with very limited experience and fewer social skills and even less confidence, going off to college to find herself, learn more about who she is and what she wants to do.

But those stories end with someone who finds themselves, learns more about themselves and what she wants to do – and I’m not sure Lexie ever does that, despite at the end of the book her refusing to go travelling. And throughout the book she’s a very passive actor in her own story, taken to things, nudged towards things and constantly, constantly running from things. I don’t think that ever really changes.

What could have been a fascinating element of this book is the world itself – the werewolf packs, the different kinds of werewolves, the peacespeakers and what they mean (hopefully beyond some vague references to Native Americans), their history and the conflict between the packs. But it didn’t work for me because so little of it was explored. We had a few lectures from Archer, some speeches by Blythe that I’m not sure we can believe and Archer’s own internal angst. I think I could have loved this world, but as it is I stand a little confused and feeling like I just didn’t quite get it all. It needed more development and exploration.

The romance is unique in that it’s between 2 women – and heartfelt and powerful as many romances in paranormal romance. But we do have the falling in love awfully quickly trope, we have the conflict that I can’t entirely agree with trope (Lexie becomes angry with Archer for killing people pointing guns at her) and we have the virgin introduced to relatively advanced sex techniques and it all going swimmingly. They’re standard tropes though and I have seen them done far worse elsewhere.

This book established itself as really tiresome to me before it hit the 40% mark – because it devolved into a series of lectures and PSAs. Far be it from us, at Fangs, to be resistant to social justice themes in books – far from it, we’d love to see more. But there’s a difference between having social justice themes and messages and having your characters recite text books and sound bites to each other. It wasn’t naturally incorporated, it didn’t flow – it was clumsy and clunky, it was didactic, it felt like the author has ripped out pages from a sociology and women’s study text book, with a side order of remedial queer theory and glued them in.

I’m not sure what it was to achieve either. People unfamiliar with the concepts are going to be put off by the blatant lecturing. People who are familiar with the theme and concepts are going to be irritated by its clumsiness and it’s extreme – even insulting – simplicity. Like deciding the only reason people may not be happy with identifying as feminists is because of the denigrations of chauvinists, ignoring the problems people have had with the feminist movement and the rise of womanism. Or dismissing labels as binary and patriarchal and inherently wrong – even saying calling oneself a lesbian is “limiting”(which is pretty damn homophobic), which not only completely ignores the strength and power many minorities get from their choice of labels, their identities, their reclaiming, their proclamations of self. The author seems to have a very narrow view on how marginalised people should think, feel and identify and has created a world which puts that on a pedestal in a way that marginalises and attacks women and GBLTQ people who don’t conform to the author’s lens.

I’m also rather bemused by the whole depiction of the lesbian feminist Pack. I mean, during the many many many lectures there’s a note that, no, feminists aren’t all rabid man-haters and that is a ridiculous straw man. This is good. And then we have the pack of lesbian feminists who… hate all men. And we’re not just talking the legitimate anger of an oppressed group – because I can get behind a good rant; because it’s not emotive. I wondered if it was supposed to be a reflection  of Blythe and her wrongheadedness but it’s common throughout the Pack. Renee, for one, gets extremely annoyed because Lexie has a conversation with a man.

What is this supposed to be? Are they supposed to be straw-feminists for us to recognise as such? But where’s the counter of actual feminists? These are the feminist depictions of this book and there’s no indication they’re wrong or parodies. Sadly even some of the strongest little dumps in the book are undermined by them – like there’s a pretty great scene where Renee emphasises to Lexie that it’s ok to say no, that “no” needs no justifications or excuses and if she doesn’t want to do something. This is excellent – but Lexie’s there thinking that she actually wants to say yes but she’s too shy and doesn’t have the confidence to do so and if you’d just shut up telling her she’s allowed to say no, she’s appreciate more encouragement to say yes. An awesome message of consent becomes, because of context, twisted instead into a “the shy girl needs friends to push her past her comfort zone”